THE mayor of the deprived Labour council hosting the Olympics is defying Government calls for wage restraint and awarding himself an inflation-busting pay rise.

Olympic mayor has given himself a pay rise despite government warnings of bloated councils []

Sir Robin Wales, the mayor of Newham Council in east London, seized the four per cent rise this month, taking his salary to £81,029 a year.

His pay is now 34 per cent more than the £58,500 he received when he was directly elected mayor in 2002.

Sir Robin’s decision to accept the rise came after he ordered cuts of £28million and as his staff face a two-year pay freeze.

Awarded a knighthood in 2000 by Tony Blair, the 55-year-old Scot is the most powerful local Labour politician in Britain. He was awarded the pay rise by a vote of councillors, all of whom are Labour.

In return, opponents say, he rewards party colleagues by appointing them to part-time jobs on wages most voters in one of Britain’s poorest boroughs can only dream of.

Jobs have been created for more than half of Newham’s 60 Labour councillors, many of whom earn more than £40,000 a year for a few meetings a month.

Sir Robin, who sits on Seb Coe’s Olympic organising committee and will be a prominent figure when the Games open in Stratford in 2012, barred the council’s press officers from answering questions from the Sunday Express about the authority’s costs.

In another example of the local authority gravy train, it has emerged that a delegation from Tory-controlled Plymouth City Council spent taxpayers’ money on a trip to the World Cup.

Chief executive Barry Keel, council leader Vivien Pengelly and Doug Fletcher, chairman of the city’s 2018 World Cup bid group, returned from South Africa last week.

The visit was partly funded by the Football Association but cost Plymouth taxpayers £5,700. Mrs Pengelly said: “We thought long and hard about whether we could afford to take part at a time of economic difficulty but, on balance, we felt it would have been a false economy not to have gone.”

Does your council waste money? Email gravytrain@express.co.uk with the details.